ColumnSomewhere in the second hour of sorting through a handful of travel reservations that had been added to my calendar, I started to suspect I'd been lied to – by a computer. Searching in vain for a ticket that I seemed to have received – by the entries in my calendar – I realised that an itinerary I'd drawn up as a suggested …

It was only a matter of time before the machines started fighting back. And let's be honest, we all knew the software engineers would be the first to fall. And so it was that Ibrahim Diallo, in California, USA, found himself fired from his job, had his network access and his entry card killed, and was unable to get himself …

Good news! Automation capable of erasing white collar jobs is coming, but not for a decade or more. And that’s also the bad news because interest in automation accelerates during economic downturns, so once tech that can take your job arrives you’ll already have lived through another period of economic turmoil that may already …

ResearchArtificial Intelligence, machine learning, the fourth industrial revolution – we’re hearing a lot about how technology is going to automate everything and render whole cohorts of fleshy, fallible and inefficient humans surplus to needs. Some commentators highlight IT professionals as a vulnerable group here, especially those …

On September 8th, 2015, a pilot left Point Cook Airfield in the Australian State of Victoria for a solo navigational training flight. She didn’t make it back: the plane “impacted rising terrain” about two-thirds of the way into the journey and the Australian Transport Safety Bureau report on the accident, published today, …

Middle-class Brit online supermarket nirvana Ocado posted losses of £500,000 for 2017, down from £12m profit the previous year – largely thanks to its "transformation" into a technology provider flogging robot-operated warehouses. The company splashed £42.8m on technology last year, up from £34.3m the year before. That …

Two research papers argue that the risk of AI-driven automation isn't so much the destruction of jobs as the amplification of wealth inequality. That is to say workers in our brave new world will still have things to do, but many of them, assisting and assisted by machines, will be paid poorly while robot owners get rich. In …

ReviewTypically when reviewing new electronic products – especially if it's a system of interacting components – you start from a very positive place. You imagine you could have in your hands the next big device – the thing everyone will be getting excited about in a few months' time – and then slowly, as you find its bugs and flaws …

So, robots are coming to take your jobs after all* but techies shouldn't be scared, not in the slightest. This is the opinion of the Centre for Policy Studies, which today released the paper Why Britain Needs More Robots, a report that claims Britain doesn't have enough automatons in its workplaces yet – at least not of the …

PollCar-maker Ford has revealed a robot that's taken the job of sitting on your arse. Described as a “metallic butt” in video below, the device is used to determine “the exact pass pattern of a person's sitting behaviour” so that the company can design better car seats. The robot simulates sitting in and out of a car seat 25,000 …

Puppet has rolled out the corporate playbook and turned puppet master for another automation company. Oregon-based automation vendor Puppet acquired the continuous delivery software firm Distelli on Wednesday for an undisclosed amount. Puppet swapped out its founder and CEO with COO Sanjay Mirchandani back in September 2016. …

While tech luminaries fret about the world-killing potential of self-directed computers amid galas and globetrotting, the industry's worker bees see automation as salvation from soul-killing drudgery. So it was at AnsibleFest in San Francisco on Thursday, which proved to be more sysadmin speed evangelism than freewheeling …

About 80 per cent of jobs in retail transportation, warehousing and logistics and 63 per cent of jobs in sales are at risk of disappearing, thanks to increasingly capable automated systems. This bleak news – for workers, though not necessarily for employers – comes from Oxford researchers Carl Benedikt Frey, co-director for …

Much of the hype surrounding self-driving cars arises from the fact that people are terrible drivers. Automated systems, we're told, can help save lives. Ignoring for a moment all the technical problems that still need to be solved before people can expect to be chauffeured by machine – dealing with adverse weather or …

Raising the minimum wage increases the chance employers will automate low-skill jobs away, according to a paper published this week through National Bureau of Economic Research, a non-profit group of econ wonks. In People Versus Machines: The Impact of Minimum Wages on Automatable Jobs, Grace Lordan, associate professor in …

As drivers contemplate computer controlled cars, physicians get to ponder self-driven surgery tools. In a research paper published on Wednesday, "Robot Autonomy for Surgery," UC San Diego assistant professor Michael Yip and PhD student Nikhil Das explore the growing role played by surgical robots and the issues raised by …

Average annual salaries for maintenance jobs advertised online fell by 7.5 per cent this year - but the firm behind the analysis has warned that we shouldn’t forget about the humans who look after systems just yet. According to figures released today by jobs search engine Adzuna, the average annual salary of maintenance jobs …

Cisco will next week reveal something called “Project Starship” that it promises will allow greater and easier automation of UCS servers and its HyperFlex hyperconverged appliances, no matter if they run in the data centre, remote office or a small business. Details are scarce at the time of writing, but next week's Cisco Live …